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A SERMON, 



PREACHED ON 



lb* p»ti»H»I ©bawfegigivittg gag, 



NOVEMBER 26th, 1863, 



KEV. ALEXANDER H. VINTON, D.D., 



RECTOR OF ST. MARK'S CHURCH, IN THE BOWERIE, 



nsrE-vv--^ Oit ic . 




N E W - Y R K : 
GEORGE F. NESBITT & CO., PRINTERS AND STATIONERS, 

CORNER OF PEARL AND PINE STS. 

1863. 



4-58 



. 3 



K H R A T A . 

Page 9, line 7. — For ••lionor," i'cihI liovroi-. 

Page 18, line 19 — For ''<|uinti'ii>lf." read ((uiiituple. 



New-York, November 28th, 1863. 

To THE Rev. Dr. Vinton : 

Dear Sir, — We, the undersigned members of Saint Mark's 
Church in the Bowerj, having been present at the discourse de- 
livered by you on Thanksgiving Day, and being deeply impressed 
with the truth and value of its sentiments, and equally convinced 
that its circulation would be beneficial to the community, respect- 
fully request that you will consent to its publication. 

We are. dear sir. 

With esteem and regard, 

Yours, faithfully, 

CHARLES EASTON, THOMAS McMULLEN, 

JOHN W. CHANLER, albert G. THORP, Jr., 

* E. B. UNDERHILL, WILLIAM J. REMSEN, 

LEWIS M. RUTHERFORD, MEIGS D. BENJAMIN, 

E. B. WESLEY, GRANT THORBURN, Jr., 

H. STUYVESANT, B. R. WINTHROP, 

r. W. BOARDMAN, P. M. SUYDAM, 

W. H. SCOTT, RUTHERFORD STUYVESANT. 

P. C. SCHUYLER, ALEX. T. STEWART. 



I 



To Messrs. Charles Easton, J. W. Chanler, and others : 

Gentlemen, — I am happy to learn that you think my Dis- 
course may be of use, and, as you request it for publication, I for- 
ward it to you cheerfully and thankfully. 

I am, gentlemen, 

Very truly and respectfully yours, 

ALEXANDER H. VINTON. 

St. Mark's Rectory, Dec. \st 1863. 



Judges 5, 11. 

" Thej that are delivered from the noise of the archers in the 
places of drawing water ; there shall they rehearse the righteous 
acts of the Lord towards the inhabitants of His villages in Israel 
— then shall the people of the Lord go down to the gates." 

This is a part of the triumphal song of Deborah 
and Barak. Jabin the Canaanitish king had been 
defeated, and Sisera, his head captain, had died by 
a woman's hand ; and then the prophetess and the 
warrior of Israel sang this psalm of praise, ascrib- 
ing the victory to the Lord, and indicating, in the 
words of the text, that the war shall be memo- 
rable. 

They who have escaped the noise of the archers, 
the whistling of their arrows, shall gather at the 
places of familiar resort and rehearse the right- 
eous and beneficial acts of the Lord towards his 
people, and they shall go down to the gates, in and 
out of the land, without embargo or hindrance of 
any sort. 

It is man's prerogative alone, as head of the 
animal creation, to register and rehearse the deeds 
of his Maker. Brute creatures behold events, but 
they behold them as facts not as phenomena, that 
witness to a power behind, and within, and above. 



6 

Another and yet higher attribute of man is, that he 
can sort these facts into a system and a sequence ; 
can develope a design in the deeds of his Maker ; 
can prove a plan in His providence, and bear wit- 
ness to a wisdom in all the ways of God as he 
traverses His world to and fro ; and so man can 
lay his intellect alongside of God's mind. 

And a third and superlative faculty of man is^ 
that what his mind thus perceives his heart and 
soul appreciates and adores. He is mute with 
admiration. He thrills with reverence. He is rapt 
and possessed with love. He rises to his feet and 
shouts his exulting gratitude, and thus his heart 
and soul are side by side with God's heart. They 
pulse together. The sympathy makes them one. 

This attribute of man is moral not mental, higher 
and diviner than mind, for mind is a mechanism ; 
but the moral is a character and a state of being. 
This makes man kin to the angels even while he is 
first cousin to the brutes. It proves him capable 
of Heaven even while he crawls and gropes in the 
dust and dirt of the earth. 

Thanksgiving, therefore, exercises and gives 
play to man's whole triplet of powers — to rehearse 
God's deeds — to read and recognize their righteous 
purpose, and to praise and rejoice over them be- 
cause they are righteous, and because they are 
His. 

For this we are come together to-day, to praise 



God for his righteous and kindly providences to- 
wards us. And not towards you and me alone, but 
to the whole legitimate nation. 

Even now in this forenoon ten thousand voices 
are rehearsing, as mine is, the righteous acts of the 
Lord; and a hundred times ten thousand are 
sounding forth His praises, as you have done in 
psalm, and chant, and anthem, and hallelujah. 
How comes it ? The nation's chief invites the 
nation to a service of solemn and holy praise, and 
the nation with one and glad consent join in jubi- 
late. But for what ? Is not the nation in 
mourning? Is it not whirling round and round in the 
maelstrom of civil war, that threatens to engulph 
it bodily and forever ? Are we not struggling in 
the stern sad strife of fratricide ? Is not the land 
stained red every where and soaked with blood ? 
May you not almost say : " There is not a house 
where there is not one dead." Do you not meet 
maimed and useless men at every corner ? Have 
we not given the best blood and the best talent in 
sacrifice to Moloch — men of birth, of culture, and 
highest moral worth. Are not whole households 
draped in black with their hearts broken. And 
can you then give thanks ? Can you change all 
these signs of woe into evidences of blessing ? Can 
you distil bitter tears into sweet joys ? Can 
you coin golden gratitude out of the dust and 
ashes of our dead ? — or turn the quiver of agonized 



8 

nerves and muscles into the thrill of ecstacy. From 
all this minor key of manifold mourning that 
creeps in ten thousand dirges over the land, can 
you combine a chorus of praise and rejoicing ? 
Thanksgiving in the midst of a home war ; is it not 
absurd ? 

These questions seem to be pertinent, and from 
one point of view, forcible, if not convincing. We 
must admit the many wrecks of health, wealth and 
peace ; the desolations of home and heart ; the failure 
of plans, prospects and hopes, and above all, the 
bloody cost of the war — paid in wounds and death, 
by the thousands, who have gone forth to the fight. 
I would not tone .down the picture by a single shade. 
Foreground, middle, distance and perspective, I 
would bring them all under one stream of bright 
light, and in that light I would group the classes of 
sufferers at once, and invoke your keen compassion, 
your sympathy, your tears, your help. As we gaze 
on the picture we witness the shock of battalions ; 
the wild mixture of warring men, piercing, and 
hacking, and cleaving each other to the ground ; 
the sweep of cannon shot, laying the columns low, 
as if by a huge besom ; ghastly wounds, gushing 
blood, fractured limbs, explicable and inexplicable ; 
we see and wonder at the placid smile of him who 
died in an instant from a gun shot, as his frame 
lies easily on the turf where he fell ; and we see, 
with no less wonder, the writhings and grimaces of 



9 

agony of those who could not die, doomed to carry 
about a life too strong for wounds, though not too 
strong for woe. We see the field when the battle is 
over, when the hosts are gone, and the fruits of war 
are ripe to rottenness ; and then our natures are 
overpowered by the complication of feeling ; of pity, 
which draws us on, and honor, which revolts and 
repels us, and we shut our eyes and wave the dark 
vision away. And, in another part of the picture, 
we seem to stand among the prisoners of war, 
packed together in starvation and filth ; dying of 
unmedicated wounds, or by the slow torture of 
hunger and cold. And as we draw back our gaze 
to the foreground that is nearest to us, we count for 
every single sufi^erer on the field or in the prison, a 
sympathizing group, of which he was once the 
centre, and in whom his agony is multiplied over 
and over. And this is but a fraction of the woe. 
I presume that war can have no adequate picture. 
It can tell its own story only to witnessing eyes 
and ears upon the spot, and they can never cata- 
logue its horrors, for no eye and ear can know the 
cruelties that are going on every where at once, 
and no heart could sustain itself against the crush- 
ing accumulation if all the agonies were massed 
into one view. Say " TPar," and you have pro- 
nounced a word whose one syllable contains all 
animal sorrow concentrated. Prefix the adjective 
and call it '' Civil IFar," and you add a social and a 



10 

moral element to the agony which makes it three- 
fold, and leaves no other woe in the world to be 
compared to it. 

Yet, strange to say, it has its compensation and 
redress. Even though it be the mother and the 
child of sin, God has many a time overruled its 
wrathful mission, to evoke all the better powers of 
humanity ; to stir up slumbering energies of mind 
and heart, in persons and in nations ; to hew the 
pathway of civilization, and to open the yet brighter 
path of grace and the Gospel. The savagery of light 
is sure to give place at last to the gentlenesses of a 
better humanity. The reaction from the warlike is 
always towards the womanly and the tender, be- 
cause the overworked passions collapse from sheer 
necessity of nature, and in their sleep and inanition 
they can only dream of the horrors which they have 
not strength enough to re-produce, and they shudder 
as they dream, and take on compunction. And at 
this first sign of sensibility the kindly sentiments 
raise their modest lips to the ears of the soul, and 
whisper " love, fraternity, forgiveness, peace," and 
when the nature wakes it is warlike no more. When 
the ugly passions have been thus quenched and 
drowned in blood, war leaves for its generation a 
surer heritage of peace, security and social advance- 
ment, through the energies, moral and mental, that 
it waked into such forceful play. There is blood 
upon the arena ; but it is the price that manhood 



11 

paid for a higher style of manhood. It was a 
strenuous leap of society for the next foothold of 
civilization. It was the last and critical struggle 
of a people for the stability of the government and 
the unity of the nation, in which is garnered up 
all possible prosperity, through an indefinite and 
progressive future, and when that last warlike 
struggle is successfully achieved, the patriot may 
die with the prayer on his lips, that is both a prayer 
and a prophecy : " My country, be thou perpetual 
as the ages." 

If such, then, be our war, as who can doubt it is, 
surely we are not without a theme for thanksgiving, 
that we are permitted to look through the dark vista 
out upon an expanse of serene light and beauty. 
And we may do more than this, we may recognize 
God's sovereignty in this war which he has permitted 
to be waged against the sovereignty of the nation. 
Although conceived and born in selfishness and 
pride, he has not so forfeited or foregone his claim 
of supremacy as to leave the war without his watch 
and supervision. He has purposes of his own 
divine pleasure to be worked out through it, and he 
will win praise even through such wrath of man as 
caused this fratricidal strife. Fratricidal did I call 
it ? It is worse. It wears the black unnatnralness 
of a matricide. For they who fired the first shotted 
gun in this embroilment aimed at the heart and life 
of the most benign of mothers, and would have slain 



12 

her if J^hey could, even as she lay asleep, reposing 
in fond confidence in her children. Could that 
Divine power, who, w^hen he established civil 
government among men, made patriotism and piety, 
to be identical ? could he look with indifference, look 
without a frown upon a rebellion that wore such a 
maniac look of hate to a nation and a government 
which he had nursed and fostered, and led with 
his own right hand ? He could not, and he has 
not ; and I ask you to review with me the ways in 
which He has shown displeasure with rebellion. 
Without arrogating any merit of prowess to our- 
selves, or rejoicing for our own peculiar skill, let 
us see how God has bent back the point of the 
rebellion to pierce its own bosom, and dealt with 
the plans of our enemies, and disappointed them 
every one. 

Eecall the high and boastful pretensions with 
which this war was plotted and begun, and then 
mark how an overruling power has, by a single 
touch, caused them, one by one, to wilt and shrink 
away, like some succulent shoot, made up and 
swollen with sap, which, when crushed between 
the thumb and finger, leaks out its moisture, 'and 
leaves not fibre enough for a skeleton, or a dried 
specimen, or a fossil. 

The first influence that led the rebellion to its 
birth, was the conviction, which was universal at 
the South, that the men of the Northern States 



13 

would not and could not fight. It was a very 
natural state of mind for a people who, themselves 
not largely educated, knew us only at a distance ; 
a people who, trained and grown up in the indo- 
lence of absolute power, despised the labor and 
activity wliich lay at the foundation of our mechani- 
cal, manufacturing, commercial, and educational 
success. Deeming us ignoble, they supposed us 
incapable of sentiment, of high mindedness^ and of 
courage. Accustomed to act from whim, from pas- 
sion, or from will, and so to act vehemently, they 
had no conception of a ^9?'mcijo?e as supreme above 
impulse, and holding the passions under curb ; of 
courage, that acted only when it was right and 
dutiful ; of manliness, that was noble and, at the 
same time, cool. 

And so in their calculations of relative force, 
they had fixed it as an axiom, that every Southern 
warrior bore a quintriple superiority to every Nor- 
therner. They have discovered their mistake. 
They have learned that the valor which is guided 
by principle is worth twofold the courage of pas- 
sion. It has that immense repelling power which 
consists in simply standing still and saying : " You 
shall not." It may be as negative and stolid as a 
granite rock — but the rock has the strength of cen- 
turies packed into it ; and when the rushing assault 
comes, *alas ! for the assailant. His very vehe- 
mence is his destruction. His momentum mea- 



u 

sures his mischief. Waterloo was a battle of South 
and North. The victory was the power of a simple 
negative. Such was Corinth and such was Gettys- 
burgh. 

But the courage of principle is not alone the 
power to stand. Being passionless it is pru- 
dent, and as the highest prudence consists some- 
times in quick and vivid action, so, on occasion, 
it is no less bold in assault than brave in resist- 
ance, and plucks victory out of death's very jaws, 
and such was Donelson and Fort Henry. 

The South had forgotten the opinion of Washing- 
ton, that in a conflict between them, and the North, 
though they might win the early fight the quality 
of endurance would give the final victory to us. 
Out of this prolific misconception of character 
sprang the first act of rebellion. Had they known 
us as well then as now, it is safe to say, the gun- 
ner at Charleston would have plunged his port fire 
into the sea. 

There was another misconception that lay by the 
side of this like a twin-brother, rocked in the same 
cradle. It was the persuasion that a predomina- 
ting portion of the North would coalesce and act 
with the South. Even if they had no direct assu- 
rance of this, there was enough in the political his- 
tory of the country to suggest the thought. In the 
Caucus, in the Congress, in the Cabinet, they had 
been accustomed to dictate and always with power. 



15 

They spake and it was done. They wished and we 
were willing. They planned, we executed. They 
sketched the programme of the drama, and the 
obliging and many-sided North played every part 
from hero down to harlequin. But this was in 
piping times of peace and party, and the dramatis 
personaB were only politicians. They represented 
Northern character to the lordly patrons of the 
scene, and how should the supercilious natures 
who knew us only in this scenic character of easy 
subserviency, ever dream of the deep and solemn 
soberness with which the Northern conscience held 
to its patriotism and its loyalty, as a drowning 
wife clings to her husband's waist, her last and 
only hope of life. They feel now how cruel their 
mistake has been ; and we, who are nearer to it, 
know how complete it was. We know that the 
party sympathy they leaned upon is not only a 
broken reed but a reed split in twain from top to 
bottom. We know how the grand voice of the 
people which, when it is thoughtful and well 
advised, is only second in its magnificent autho- 
rity to the voice of God, has pronounced upon that 
sympathy; has pronounced that fellowship with 
rebellion is treason to the nation ; and we know 
by the prophetic light of history that the politician 
who, in a time of his country's war, is in sympathy 
with her foes, seals in advance the doom of his 
own discomfiture. A dignified retirement into an 



16 

unnoticeable privacy is henceforward his best suc- 
cess. With his coronet imjewelled and histreless, 
his choicest hope must be, that the world may 
please to forget him. 

A third mistake which buttressed this bold re- 
bellion, was the persuasion on the part of the 
South that their great product, cotton, was so in- 
dispensable to the manufacturing nations of Europe, 
that rather than lose it, they w^ould make common 
cause with the rebellion and ensure its success. 
To their minds the royal ships of state in Europe 
had all cast their anchors in South Carolina ; they 
were held to their moorings by the one stout cable 
of cotton, and if this were stranded and broken, 
the empires would drift disastrously upon a lee 
shore. The very poor would starve for want of 
labor in cotton, the middle classes would sympa- 
thize and rebel ; the aristocracy, instinctively hos- 
tile to our republic, would coalesce. The govern- 
ments under such stress would be compelled into 
a Southern alliance, and under this partnership of 
empires, the success of the rebellion would be easy 
and complete. All this was to be accomplished 
by virtue of that one self-same vegetable, cotton, 
which was deemed so indispensable to the world, 
that it might almost seem to be the necessary 
clothing of the universal humanity, the raw material 
of the human cuticle, so that without it the race 
would be not only naked but skinless. 



17 

They have now learned — and we are sharers in 
the lesson — the wonderful recuperative powers of 
human nature, among communities as well as with 
individuals. We have seen the elasticity with 
which men can accommodate themselves to strange 
and hard conditions, discover new resources, and 
supplement their wants with fresh and varying 
substitutes. 

One of the most disastrous results of this mistake 
to'the South itself is. that necessity has ploughed 
up new cotton fields in various parts of the world : 
Egypt supplants the Sea Islands, Central America 
promises to be a paradise of cotton, and the rich 
monopoly is broken up forever. There have been 
times, indeed, when the expectation of foreign in- 
terference seemed probable enough, and specially 
from two of the leading powers of Europe. To one 
of these nations we bear a blood relationship, and 
it is said, a strong family likeness. Yet our com- 
mon character is worked out on the two sides of 
the Atlantic into marked differences. 

Planted in the midst of a large continent, with a 
boundless horizon of enterprise and an indefinite 
line of progress, the Saxon nature has here run out • 
perhaps into exaggeration, like a countenance re- 
flected from a convex mirror. While cabined in 
the little isle across the water, it has become in- 
sular in all respects ; its capacities have lost much 
of their native breadth and its peculiarities have 
a 



18 

grown more and more minute, like the same counte- 
nance seen in the converging power of a concave 
glass. 

The victim of prescription, and precedent, and 
concrete forms of life, the Anglican mind stretches 
itself rarely and reluctantly to the breath of a gen- 
eral principle, either in morals, philosophy, politics 
or law ; and so upon the transatlantic face of the 
Anglo-Saxon nature, we see the wrinkles of caste 
and class, and other practical prejudices furrowed 
deep in the leathern skin of its hopeless old age, 
and the character is dull, partial, self-willed and 
self-satisfied to supercilious and snarling excess. 

With such differences of development between 
us, it is natural that while our oneness of blood 
qualifies us to analyze the Saxon character, the 
tribal feeling should make us more sorely apt to 
criticise its blemishes. If we feel obliged to admit 
the ingrain excellence of England, and respect her 
fundamental honesty and her bluff boldness, we 
admire only with a qualification ; her beauty is but 
"freckled fair." 

We rank her as the greatest of the nations, yet 
repel her as the most disagreeable of all the 
peoples of the earth. We disatfect the triple com- 
pound of nobility, commons and paupers that forms 
the nation, even though we tolerate gallantly and 
lovingly the crown that beams with the virtues of 
Victoria. 



19 

A nobility, boastful of its blood, none the less 
because it bears the bar sinister, a commercial 
Commons that carries its conscience in its hand, 
but its hand always in the pocket, graduating 
goodness by the scale of the counting-house, and 
regulating right by the balances of the ledger, 
will have none but marketa]51e virtues ; and a 
whole people, from top to bottom, with its man- 
liness fettered by the taught reverence for mere 
rank: this was the nation shop-keeping, and 
aristocratic, too, that turned away from us and 
listened with a grim smile to the golden promises 
of the patrician South. For we were England's 
rivals in shop-keeping — this was the obvious 
offence. The backflow of our democracy across the 
Atlantic had begun to undermine portions of her 
class prerogative, and this was an added grudge. 

Perhaps the old pique of being worsted in two 
wars may have been a third, and the three com- 
bined were motive enough for an effort to cripple 
and disjoin the obnoxious Kepublic. 

True, therefore, to her instincts of profit, preju- 
dice and pride, yet untrue utterly to her traditions 
of philanthropy and moral policy, England had 
well-nigh committed herself to the Southern alli- 
ance for better or worse. 

But in good season she discovered that the rebel 
cause was tottering, and her politic conscientious- 
ness receiving this new light, she began to revise 



20 

some of her equivocal admissions and initiated a 
sort of tardy justice to the United States. Her 
leading newspapers spoke out a half-way reclaimer 
of their former arguments — spoke more absolutely 
for complete neutrality, and always capped their 
logic with the potent suggestion of self-interest, 
that their committal to the Southern cause might 
furnish precedents w^hich would be found by-and- 
bye to be not wrong, not unlawful, not unfriendly, 
but simply reactionary and troublesome. This 
turned the scale of conscience and of favoritism, 
and the South saw itself crippled of its best hope. 
But one other hope was left. There was, a nation, 
we can hardly call it, and still less can we call it a 
people in any political sense of that word — but 
there was another power interested, no less than 
England, in favor of cotton and against democracy. 
This power invested in one despotic person, keen, 
ambitious, unscrupulous, whose antecedents make 
up a biography that in some other century than 
the nineteenth w^ould have suited a Borgia or a 
Cataline — this power, in its own left-handed way, 
gave the rebellion hope. But it was a short-lived 
consolation. The bow being strung too far, the 
forbearance of the French people having run to the 
length of its tether — the exchequer giving signs of 
collapse — the jealousy of the European powers 
being stirred, and the grand demonstration stood 
still where it w^as. The rebel hopes of friends 



21 

abroad were changed to disgust, and the rebel 
cause turned its back upon Europe, in doing so 
faced its foes at home, in whose countenance it 
read no hope but in submission and loyalty. And 
thus another prime delusion of the rebel mind col- 
lapsed in disappointment. 

Again, the rebellion was nursed by an added 
hope, viz., that the North, deprived of the Southern 
market, would be bankrupted and ruined ; grass 
would grow in our streets, labor would be worth- 
less, gaunt famine would watch at the doors of the 
poor ; hungry mobs would march and parade in our 
streets with the watch-words on their banners of 
" bread or blood." 

We can hardly believe it now, amidst the whirl 
and rush of all the activities of commerce, with a 
freshet of prosperity filling the channels of busi- 
ness and overflowing in munificent and magnificent 
charities ; with an increase of taxation that would 
have scared us once, met and paid easily and 
cheerfully ; with an abundant supply of life's sup- 
ports and life's elegancies, and a greater abundance 
of means to procure them; with sure evidences 
that this is not inflation and falsity, but a positive 
increase of material wealth — with all this around 
us, we can hardly conceive that the death-dealing 
prophecies of the South were ever seriously uttered 
or honestly believed. 

But they did believe it, and believe it still, until 



22 

some truant Southron, trusting in our tolerance, 
ventures among us for a refuge from his trouble- 
some tribes, and sees with his amazed eyes what 
he would never else have believed, that we are 
neither perished nor perishing. We may not be 
able to explain it thoroughly to ourselves, for it is 
one of those strange phenomena in political econo- 
my which prove it to be the most perplexed of any- 
thing that was ever called a science. 

Yet so it is, a magnificent verity and a magnifi- 
cent refutation of another great mistake of the re- 
bellion. 

I name one more delusion, the most fatal and 
hopeless of all on which this melancholy cause 
leaned its weight. It was fondly believed that 
the system of slavery would be secured beyond all 
touch and meddling from the officious North hence- 
forward. For this the rebellion was plotted. The 
Confederacy was organized with slavery for its 
corner-stone. It was the grand peculiarity which 
was to signalize it above all other political systems 
— inaugurate a new era in government, and realize 
the beau ideal of the social state. 

The Confederacy was to perpetuate the constant 
distinction between lord and serf — between power 
and submission. 

I know no example of the blinding effect of 
passion on the intellect, or of the perversion of 
the conscience by pride, than such a purpose de- 



23 

liberately uttered in a theory of government. Can 
it be that thinking men are laying their strength 
together to roll back the wheels of time — to restore 
a system which had its birth in barbarism, and has 
been dying of civilization, ever since civilization 
began to bless the race ? Can it be that while 
they rejoice in the title of " the chivalry," which 
belongs to the condition of lordship and serfdom, 
they are really willing to accept the character which 
that title originally and truly denoted ? Would they 
be as knights and barons of the middle ages, living in 
their plantation castles, with crowds of banded re- 
tainers to execute their will, with a code of principles 
in which mere arbitrary power was first and last and 
midst — a code which exalted the sentimental graces 
and ignored the solid virtues of life, which frowned 
upon an insult but warranted an injustice, which 
bade a man be watchful for his honor, though be- 
reft of honesty, which taught him to be gallant, 
and permitted him to be unchaste, to be polished 
in manner and rotten in conscience, generous yet 
grasping, hospitable, yet cruel at the pleasure of 
his passions, courtly in the saloon and savage in 
the court-yard ? Is this the character that they 
would emulate and re-produce in this noonlight of 
civilization and the Gospel ? 

It would be difficult to credit it but for the fierce 
pertinacity with which they claim it, and their 
practical illustration of the character in the uncon- 



2^ 

scientions means by which some of. the proudest of 
them procured the rebellion — means involving 
breaches of trust, violations of truth, and other 
huge dishonesties, that entitle them to take rank 
with any of the robber knights who stood foremost 
in the semi-barbarous chivalry of the middle ages. 
It is strange, too, that thinking men with an open 
Gospel should have dared to re-affirm a system of 
bondage which stands in essential antagonism to 
the spirit and power of Christianity. 

For no matter what defences of slavery may be 
extorted by elaborate inferences from the Bible, 
there is one simple and indisputable principle in 
the code of Jesus Christ, which condenses the argu- 
ment and the refutation into the briefest form : 
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, 
do ye even so unto them, for this is the law and 
the prophets." It is simple, it is comprehensive, 
it is universal. It liquidates all sophistry, and es- 
capes all entanglement. It determines involuntary 
servitude to be wrong, unless every master is will- 
ing to exchange places with his slave. " Whatso- 
ever ye would that men should do to you, do ye 
even so to them." There is but one escape from 
the seai'ching exaction, and that is to deny that 
the slave is a man. How then could such a system 
make head against the spirit of such a Gospel. 

It was a huge mistake, demonstrated to be such 
by the overruling power, that has already turned 



25 

slavery into the heaviest burden the rebellion has 
to bear. Forty thousand strong, the emancipated 
slaves have turned their arms against their masters, 
and hundreds of thousands strong, the unemanci- 
pated, have been driven into the corner States, 
where the diminished form of the rebellion now 
crouches, and there like a plague of locusts, they 
overwhelm the land with a hungry and non-pro- 
ducing population. 

Who can fail to foresee the issue of this great 
problem of slavery to the Confederacy itself? 
Who can help seeing that its corner-stone was laid 
on sand, that the noisy proclamation was a blatant 
falsehood, and the projected system a stupendous 
mistake ? 

We have now run through the catalogue of capi- 
tal errors out of which the rebellion was engen- 
dered. Each one of them has been evaporated or 
exploded, till there remains not a tangible shred of 
any. It is not our skill or prowess that has pro- 
duced this issue. It is the supremacy of that 
guiding power that holds the hearts of princes in 
his hand, that makes the diviners mad, and orders 
all things after the counsel of his own will. It is 
God moving in the earth, to foil the rebellion with 
its own weapons, and turn its strength to weakness. 
And although it is only a refusal of power, and not 
a positive conquest, that we have recited. Yet 
God's refusal is a conquest. To baulk the rebel- 
4 



26 

lion, is to destroy it, for it may say with Shylock : 
" You take away my life wiien you clo take the 
means whereby I live." 

Let us praise and give thanks to Him therefore, 
for his simple, grand and awful negative. Let us 
bow down and adore Him. And then let us thank 
Him for those positive successes in which though 
we were the actors, yet if He had not gone forth 
with our hosts, we had been the vanquished too. 

Recall the splendid victories of the year. Listen 
to the booming cannon that proclaims to-day, a new 
victory to our arms, and fresh disaster to the bad 
cause. These successes have at last pent in the 
active rebellion to five States — have tamed its 
confidence, cut off its supplies, and reduced it to a 
condition in which its courage is desperation, and 
its very victories, if it achieve any, will be almost 
as disastrous as defeats. It cannot afford to win 
battles and live, and surely it cannot afford to lose 
them. In fact, it can only aiibrd to die. We may 
praise God therefore, not only with devout grati- 
tude but with hope. 

We may look forward to the period of restored 
unity, of ripened loyalty, of a more fervent patriot- 
ism, and of universal freedom. In fact, we may 
anticipate a day when the moral and mental de- 
velopments, and the wide play of sympathy elicit- 
ed by this great struggle, shall have so exalted the 
character of this people, and joined the thirty mil- 



27 

lion hearts into one great national heart, that the 
Republic shall be perpetual — so strong and so 
pure that man cannot, and God will not destroy it. 
Then will the nation hold jubilee again, and bless 
the Almighty for the war itself. 

In this bright forecast of the future why should 
not the African have his place of hope and joy ? 
Shall not he too be lifted up by the exalting influ- 
ence of freedom to the prerogatives of a true man- 
hood ? True, we hear it said, " You cannot elevate 
him ; his nature wants capacity — wants the true 
electricity of mental life." But has the trial been 
fairly made ? We crust him over with our con- 
tempt and prejudice ; we wrap him up thickly in 
all the disadvantages of ignorance and disappoint- 
ment, and then when we touch him with a non- 
conductor of pride, or tyranny, or seltishness, if we 
do not see the instant flash, or feel an answering 
shock, we boldly pronounce him to be a non electric. 
But unwrap those folds of ignorance and fear, crack 
off that crust of contempt in which slavery has insu- 
lated him, let his naked nature come into contact 
with the life-restoring agencies of freedom, and 
then see if he, for whom Christ died, does not ex- 
hibit enough of the light and spiritual life of man- 
hood to entitle him to a place in the future of our 
Republic as a citizen, a man and a brother. 

If the war sliall be tlnis regenerative — creating 
four millions of men out of four millions of beasts 



28 

of burden — then Ethiopia may begin to lift up her 
hands to God and herald the millenium of Christ. 

If, while I speak thus, there comes before any of 
you the image of bereaved households, and the 
thoughts of bleeding hearts, and of the fresh-made 
graves of the slain in war, yet even these are ndt 
incompatible with thanksgiving. Often does grati- 
tude grow out of the grave. Its roots dive down 
into the mould of the loved dead, hero, or martyr, 
and hug, and kiss, and feed upon the very bones of 
their decay, and so gather nutriment for the sweet 
blossoms of remembrance, and the mellow fruits of 
thanksgiving and praise. So let it be with us. 
Honored is that father who can to-day name a 
martyred hero in the person of his son. Blessed 
is that mother who has given the nursling of her 
bosom to save the life of our common mother from 
shame and death. 

And now need I add a word to remind you of 
those for whom your charities are asked to-day — 
the wounded and imprisoned soldiers, forced to 
share in rebel destitution, and so almost starving 
with the leavings of rebel poverty ? 

The living are worse off than the dead. While 
you remember these with gratitude, remember the 
others with your generous pity. 



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